Return To Ground--America, Built On Experience & Reason

May, 2010 Feature--Truth Based Logic

SynopsisEgalitarian fantasy is fantasy; wishes can never be horses, nor replace reason as solution to any problem. Those who will not learn by experience can not guide to a happy future. America's intellectual grounding--an experience driven foundation.

This is a continuation of the discussion from our April, 2010 feature on "Cloud Dancing--Social Medium For Scoundrels, Neurotics & Dolts." If you have not seen the essay, please access it here: Cloud Dancing.

It will be clear to anyone, still able to reason from experience, that projects & policies driven by wish lists, without grounding in past human experience, are never likely to achieve desired results. That likelihood will certainly not increase, when those wish lists include objectives that tend to deny the validity of past experience. When wish pursuit reaches total absurdity, as in attempts by legal coercion to force acceptance--or pretense--of a non-existent equality of human potential, there is no possibility for such achievement.

Wishes can never be horses, nor replace reason as solution to any problem. Pigs do not have wings, and those who will not learn by experience will never guide anyone to a happy future.

To better understand the dichotomy between Egalitarian fantasy and the intellectual ground upon which the America, we have known, was built, consider the absurd claim by certain Egalitarian lawyers that the Federal Constitution must be interpreted, not as the framers intended, but as sitting Judges believe changing times require! In brief, to substitute social theories of the moment for the Rule of Law--for the clearly stated precepts on which the very existence of the Federal government was premised.

While similar attacks upon our fundamental institutions have been common since 1930, current excesses of the Obama Administration offer opportunity to better frame essential issues; opportunity to reawaken a public long bemused by the delusions & pseudo intellectual pretensions of an Egalitarian Left; an opportunity to give the "Mipips" (Marxist influenced pseudo intellectual poseurs) a long overdue comeuppance. The core values of the American people were born in experience & reason, not theory. To deny the Founders' intent is to ignore the very essence of the American achievement. In taking up this challenge, we embrace an opportunity to educate a new generation in that achievement.

America, as a concept apart from a geographical mass, was born in Revolution; a Revolution unlike any other--a Revolution defined for all time by an essential document, the Declaration of Independence. That instrument, sanctified by the pledged "lives, fortunes & sacred honor," of the Founding Fathers, was premised upon a recognition that Government, to be legitimate (to have legal & moral authority over its citizens), must be based upon compact--a sacred social contract--between Government & those subject to Government: Ideas born not in theory, but in the experience of settlers, who had just built self-sustaining ethnic communities, with multi-generational purpose, from the ground up.

The American Revolution was premised, not on the pursuit of new rights or new notions of what a Government should do; but, clearly & explicitly, upon the idea that the contemporaneous British Government had violated an implicit compact by infringing on primordial rights--rights endowed by God to Man at the moment of Creation.

Based upon that pledge and these concepts, the Founders declared the individual sovereignty of 13 new States. After years of bloodshed, followed by George Washington's great victory at Yorktown (1781), the complete independence of each of those States was recognized in 1783 in the Treaty Of Paris.

The Federal Constitution, adopted 1787-1789, left no doubt that the purpose was multi-generational. The Preamble states, unambiguously, "We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

A people's "posterity" are their lineal descendants. The "Union" is a Union of States, recognized as independent Nations but four years earlier. In delegating some of their sovereign independence to that Union, they had every reason to expect clarity in the bargain; clarity in the terms of a compact defining clearly what was involved--and, equally clearly, what was not involved. And, as they had just vindicated the principle that the only Government, a citizen was morally required to support, was one that secured the God given Liberty of that citizen, they wrote the provisions of their contract with purpose & determination.

To make the personal & moral responsibility assumed, equally clear, they required all office holders in that new, limited, Federal Government, to take solemn oath to preserve & defend its defining Constitution, before being permitted to act to any purpose. A generation that had pledged their lives, fortunes & sacred honor to the cause of limited Government, understood precisely what was intended for the new Federal Agency--and it was not to build a socialist bureaucracy to interfere with the liberty of the individual or to muck up an economy, pursuing wish lists of those dancing in the clouds of humanist desire.

Members of the Armed Services take the same oath to uphold & defend that Constitution--solemn bond between varied peoples acting as States--sole legal foundation for their continued "Union." For over two centuries, in major wars, as in innumerable bloody skirmishes across the globe, that sworn commitment has been baptized in the life blood of brave, decent & honorable men, who fought for the America that was; the America the Obamanists may hate, but the America we, who still understand honor, commitment, Law & morality, have an absolute duty to preserve--and, if need be, to restore.

So, too, generations of immigrants, coming to America! Even were we not so convinced as to the merits of the Constitutional Republic, the Founders established; as grandson of three immigrants, this writer would feel the most solemn personal moral obligation to preserve the America of the Founders for their posterity; for the posterity of those proud families, who permitted our own to come and live among them--to enjoy the dearly won fruits of previous sacrifice & cultural achievement. That present immigration policy does not effectively protect the Founders' heritage or posterity, is an unforgiveable outrage--a violation of the sworn duty of Federal office holders & studied insult to the honor of generations of immigrants, who took the same oath.

There may be grey areas, but any careful reading of Article I, Sections 8 through 10, will demonstrate a Constitutional purpose to preserve sound money--either gold or mediums fully convertible into gold;--to protect the obligation of contracts; to prevent the misuse of taxation to level success, or favor one class or another out of the fruits of any other person's labor; and, generally, to free--rather than restrict--individual pursuits. There is absolutely nothing in the language to suggest any 20th Century innovation intended to promote equality of achievement or an egalitarian socio/economic order, or the absurdity that is now described as "Multi-culturalism."

How dare theorists mock the essential precepts of America, as an ongoing concept; as a multi-generational pursuit--the vindication of an enduring recognition of a natural order & of principles that flow from an acceptance of that order! What can anyone say of one, who would deliberately violate an oath on which the very continuity of a people's government & socio/political institutions depend? The fact that intellectual degenerates may offer silly verbal rationalizations for such conduct--may play word games with a sworn obligation, for which men with honor & integrity have died--does not mitigate the betrayal. It only compounds the evil!

This well demonstrated example of rationalizing the most egregious misconduct, at the highest level, has not been lost on those with a less than adequate moral compass in private business. Here is a model for creative book-keeping at Enron or at Lehman Brothers. Here, a moral standard for the behavior of a Bernie Madoff! Yet, while Madoff, who cheated people out of billions of dollars, has gone to prison for the rest of his life; politicians, who have stolen a people's birthright together with fruits of their multi-generational labor valued in the trillions of dollars, continue to strut across the public stage, pretending to be honorable men, even public benefactors! Surely, on any rational moral scale, they must rank substantially below both Madoff & the scoundrels at Enron & Lehman Brothers.

The Constitution was not ratified on the premise that men, who obviously despise the bold, free, society that made us the envy of the world, would, in future generations, try to remake the Federal structure on which the varied peoples of the original States had agreed to come together, into one premised upon mass dependence on a bureaucracy. The Founders did not pledge the future happiness of their respective peoples to possible bondage to whatever band of neurotic theorists might secure office at any particular time. Their enduring, multi-generational, purpose, in giving us so carefully worded a Constitution, was precisely the opposite.

Do We Have A Future?

We realize that today's greater mobility, often utilized by major Corporations to move key personnel, has appeared to lessen the importance of rooted communities, and the fundamental importance of strong families with a sense of multi-generational purpose, as a social bedrock. But that appearance is only delusion. Without strong families with multi-generational purpose, there can be no continuity of a people, community or value system, only a variety of social chaos. This may differ in form, but little in function, from that obtained in much of Europe after the fall of Rome, when plundering conquerors swept away much of what had seemed the permanent institutions of those whose world had now collapsed; chaos replaced in time by a new feudal system, where new families, with multi-generational purpose, would hold sway for centuries over the remnants of the fallen.

Any civilization, any community with an understanding of functional continuity, must depend very largely on families with multi-generational purpose; conscious of their lines of descent; determined to provide for their posterity--to retain their achievements, cultural, spiritual & material, in an ever growing patrimony, down through those generations.

They tell us that Caligula made his horse a Senator, and that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Dare we suggest that there are still greater scoundrels--or yet greater fools--betraying their duty in Washington, today? Rome survived a few centuries after Caligula & Nero. But does anyone believe that America can survive the antics of Clinton, Bush, Obama, Pelosi & company, even another generation, in any recognizable form?

Do we have a future? Not unless we understand our past; to begin again to learn from experience, by reason; to recognize again the multi-generational purpose of our Constitution, the clear limitations on the Government it created, and the necessity for all, who have such understanding, to reassert commitment to that manifest intent.

William Flax

Obama did not just happen! For generations, Americans have been bombarded with challenges to the continuity of their values, culture & identity.

Return Of The Gods explores the impact of this ideological assault, to demonstrate political, social & economic effects that would lead to the 2008 disaster. Will Welfare State premises bring yet more chaos, followed by violence & revolution? Consider>>